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LOCKED IN THE CABINET

As Election Day 2012 approached, Rice’s Benghazi nightmare reinforced Plouffe’s tendency to rein in surrogates and lock down departmental policymaking, even to the point of delaying key Obamacare policies. The wry and obsessive former Obama campaign manager had returned to the administration in early 2011, and he quickly laid down the law in a series of conference calls with campaign and White House staff in the early spring. Cabinet officials, he said, were to keep a low profile, and their schedules would need to be routed through his office, located a few feet from the Oval. “I want to see everything,” he told his staff.

Holder kept trying to slip the net. In late 2011, he pitched Obama’s top staff on the idea of delivering speeches on topics ranging from immigration to health care. He was rebuffed: “Do your job, stay in your lane,” was Plouffe’s terse response. In spring 2012, after Holder made a far-ranging address on the legal rationale behind the U.S. drone strike that killed American-born al Qaeda sympathizer Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, a furious Plouffe took the uncommon step of prevailing on Obama personally to keep Holder on message, according to Obama aides.

Plouffe also decided to defer the typical second-term transition personnel planning. Stories would leak out, he worried, which could motivate Republicans and suppress Democratic turnout in the presidential election at a time when the Obama team most needed to emphasize the uncertainty of the outcome. The basic prognosis for the post-election Cabinet seemed clear anyway: Gates successor Leon Panetta, Geithner and Clinton were gone, and their proposed replacements had already been identified. Chu, along with lackluster Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, wasn’t asked to leave, but both knew enough to submit their resignations. Obama wanted LaHood and Salazar to stay, but they were unlikely to do so, given their need to make money after years of government paychecks.

Still, Obama was in no mood for a mass turnover. If anything, he craved continuity and peace, in part because Senate Republicans would turn even the least-controversial agency nominations into time-sucking hot-coal walks. So, in the weeks after the election, the president summoned a handful of Cabinet members, one by one, to the Oval Office to discuss their future plans, in the hope that most of them would stay put.

At the top of the question-mark list was Holder, who had told some people he was itching to leave, musing that he could be gone by the summer of 2013. He told others he enjoyed the job and that it was his wife who was agitating for a quick exit.

It’s not clear if Obama asked Holder to stay or if he just didn’t ask him to leave; it was probably some combination. What is certain is that Holder and the president discussed the future a lot during Holder’s many suppers in the residence, which one person close to both men estimated as a twice-a-month occurrence. The president, by all accounts, enjoys being around the garrulous attorney general, and Holder isn’t shy about mixing business with pleasure. During the 2011 Super Bowl, the pair settled their decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act against constitutional challenges. A few weeks after the election, during dinner, Holder presented Obama with a detailed memo containing his plans for the second term, which included increased prosecution of gun crimes, revisiting mandatory minimum sentences and a new raft of challenges to voter ID laws.

Obama was enthusiastic, but he was also aware of his friend’s shortcomings and had told skeptical aides, “Eric isn’t going to stay for the full eight years,” according to one of them. Any hope his enemies had that Holder’s departure was imminent evaporated in the spring of 2013, however, when it was revealed that Holder had signed off on the wiretapping of reporters in a leaks probe. He had no intention of going out under a cloud, he told friends, and he shrugged off rumors that Obama planned to replace him with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Not long ago, Holder told a questioner that he planned to stay around indefinitely.

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Holder’s decision to stay came as something of a jolt to Janet Napolitano, Obama’s homeland security secretary, who had made no effort over the years to hide her interest in running the Justice Department. The start of Obama’s second term seemed to provide a natural opportunity for a promotion.

Obama liked Napolitano—he twice vetted her for the Supreme Court—and stood by her even when she infamously said “the system worked” after the so-called underwear bomber nearly blew up a flight on Christmas Day 2009. Over the next year, she rehabilitated herself by seizing a central role on immigration, serving as a shield for the White House at a time when Obama was drawing fire from all sides. Obama backed sweeping immigration reform but believed it was politically impossible for him to achieve without first proving he was serious about border enforcement.

Napolitano embraced the approach. For three years, she presided over an unprecedented crackdown at the Mexican border, shattering Bush-era records with nearly 1.2 million deportations between 2009 and 2012. But as the election approached, Hispanic advocacy groups began to view the crackdown as an emblem of Obama’s unfulfilled promises for immigration reform and started asking uncomfortable questions: Latinos had given Obama almost 70 percent of their support in 2008 for this? Several of Obama’s top advisers, led by West Wing staffer Cecilia Muñoz, pressed for a more lenient border policy, pushing Napolitano to shift to a more targeted detention policy aimed at capturing criminal aliens, a half-dozen aides involved in the process told me.

Napolitano agreed, but she wanted to move slowly, to get buy-in from agents in the field. Muñoz and the Obama campaign’s Hispanic outreach team suspected Napolitano was “looking after her own politics,” with an eye toward another run in Arizona or even a national campaign. The stalemate broke in mid-2012, when Napolitano presented the White House with a memo calling for “prosecutorial discretion,” which dramatically cut the number of deportations.

Napolitano’s actions hadn’t endeared her to the left, but Obama and his team thought that Big Sis—among themselves they adopted the nickname pinned on the secretary by Matt Drudge—had a good sense of how to calibrate policy and political imperatives. That didn’t guarantee a promotion, even though Obama and his team had hinted at one for years, with Obama’s aides, in their efforts to get her to take the DHS post in 2008, even describing the job as a “first step,” according to a person involved in the transition.

During her post-election Oval Office sit-down with Obama in late 2012, Napolitano suggested that she would serve in any role Obama wanted, but she also made a point of telling him she wasn’t the source of stories suggesting she was gunning for Holder’s job. Obama was his usual vague self, offering Napolitano a hearty thank you and an oblique assurance that she would play a vital role in the second term. She responded with a vow to stay around for “roughly another year.”

But Napolitano was restless. According to two administration officials who later spoke with Holder, she pulled him aside during a joint trip to Germany in May and said, “Every organization needs to have a change after a while,” which Holder interpreted as a request to go. People close to Napolitano deny she said that, insisting she told him, “I’m having a good time at DHS.”

But Holder said he felt the pressure. “Sometimes I feel like Janet is touching me just to see if I’m still warm,” he joked to a friend.

By last spring, a frustrated Napolitano fielded a call from a headhunter looking to fill the University of California’s president post. When she dropped by the Oval Office to tell Obama she was mulling the move, the president was chagrined but not surprised: “Oh shit, Janet!”